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Friday, February 19, 2010

Mika and Wall-e Training Feb. 15, 2010

We rented the arena two days after the fun match, so that Wall-e could hopefully gain some more confidence.

Mika was fast and confident!! She was a speeding little black and silver ball of fluff. (Yeah, she needs a haircut.) She was so happy to be training again. I love training her!! We refreshed sending vs. turning cues over a line of jumps. She did much better than I expected (ha, why should I be surprised, she *always* beats my expectations, it's ridiculous). It turns out that she actually does have an awesome response to my cues, but I just have sloppy handling.

Now for the awesome news: Wall-e wasn't scared or stressed at all, even though this is the same arena he was stressing at just two days earlier! At the beginning he was a bit hesitant, but followed me into the arena, where he immediately relaxed. I mean, it was like, BAM, he relaxed, as soon as he saw the empty arena. I think the whole fun match environment was stressing him, not only the fear of the sound of the snow sliding. Weird because he used to be confident in trial environments. I'll have to think about that one. Oh well; he was really relaxed this time, which you can see from his cute happy smile :)

During the actual agility training, Wall-e was fast too! The second dog walk in this video was really insanely fast; he was super-extending!! It was probably his fastest DW ever. He was a very good little man. Seeing Wall-e weave also still holds novelty for me because he just finished learning them last fall and hasn't done a set of twelve weaves since December.

Welcome!

Hi there! It's good to see you stopping in at my blog. On Dream Dogz, I write about my two active dogs' agility training and trialing, and share all of the lessons I learn along the way. I also occasionally talk about our progress in dealing with my dogs' specific "challenges" that we are slowly, but surely, overcoming together (specifically, Mika's dog reactivity and Wall-e's fear of constant noises).